How cable networks are cramming more ads in your favorite shows

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

Cable TV networks have found a new way to stuff more commercials into reruns of old TV shows and movies without extending the run time: they’re literally speeding them up.

Networks TBS and TNT have used compression technology to shorten programming, Wall Street Journal reports. TBS has sped up crowd pleasers from Seinfeld reruns to the movie The Wizard of Oz, and TNT has done the same with Friends. The most discernible impact on the viewer is that the characters’ voices are a notch higher.

Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman said of the practice: “It feels wrong. It is not how it was shot, written or imagined. It wasn’t meant to be that way, so don’t make it that way.”

But the networks are trying to offset shrinking ad revenue. “It is a way to keep the revenue from going down as much as the ratings,” one top executive at a major cable programmer told the WSJ. “The only way we can do it is to double down and stretch the unit load a little more.”

According to Nielsen, the average commercial time on cable TV per hour has increased to 15.8 minutes in 2014 from 14.5 minutes five years ago, with networks such as MTV, TV Land and Spike now containing over 20 minutes of non-programming content an hour.

How the great unbundling of pay TV could backfire on consumers

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com

By Brad Tuttle, MONEY

For years, couch potatoes have dreamed of an a la carte pay TV model. Instead of the standard package—a bloated bundle with hundreds of channels that you’re paying for whether you ever tune in or not—the a la carte option would allow customers to pick and choose and pay for only those deemed worthy. Every household is different, but the average pay TV customer watches only 17 channels, a small fraction of the 189 channels that are factored into the average package’s monthly bill.

To which the natural reaction of many customers tired of constantly rising cable bills is: Wouldn’t it be a cinch to save a bundle simply by eliminating the bundle?

In fact, while the oversized bundle remains the standard, the door tounraveling the cable package has been opened, thanks to the arrival of a broad variety of viewing options—notably including standalone streaming options that require no cable package from HBO, the Dish Network, and of course Netflix. Admittedly, Dish’s just-introduced Sling TV streaming service is also a bundle, but it comes with only 11 popular, very watchable channels (including all-important ESPN), and at just $20 a month, it’s a potentially big money saver.

To many, it’s a just and foregone conclusion that the big cable bundle will continue to lose its dominance in the marketplace, and that cord cutters and upstart competitors will push us all toward an increasingly a la carte system. There are likely to be more small and affordable packages along the lines of Sling TV, and we’ll probably see more options to pay to stream content from favorite individual channels, which HBO and CBS have already made possible.

And yet, as much as consumers loathe the big pay TV providers, analysts have long warned that we should be careful what we wish for in terms of an a la carte viewing future that doesn’t necessarily involve Cablevision, Comcast, Verizon, or Time Warner Cable.

Back in 2010, New Yorker business columnist James Surowieckiwrote that if the bundle disappeared, the cost per customer for each channel would soar, “perhaps on a customer-by-customer basis.” The likely result would be that loads of channels would go out of business, and that the average customer would pay roughly the same amount monthly he was paying for the big bundle, only with far fewer channels.

The landscape has changed since then, what with the consensus assumption that TV in the future will be delivered via the Internet rather than cable. Yet the argument that unbundled TV will not necessarily yield cheaper prices remains. Among cable defenders, this acclaimed manifesto from 2013 summed up the big upside to the bundle, including more content and cheaper prices when they’re broken down on a per-person, per-channel basis:

Cable TV is socialism that works; subscribers pay equally for everything, and watch only what they want, to the benefit of everyone.

It will be deeply fragmented. That could threaten the very companies that pioneered this space to begin with—and make it more difficult and more expensive to get everything you want to watch.

In light of Dish’s rollout of Sling TV this week, Neil Irwin of the New York Times summed up previous research on the topic of how an a la carte TV scene would play out, writing, “contrary to many peoples’ intuition, the unbundling of cable service could actually lead to slightly higher prices for fewer channels.”

Irwin pushes the issue further, diving into the idea that not only could unbundling provide worse value, but there’s a good chance it’d make the average customer even more miserable regarding pay TV than he is right now. And the cautionary tale he cites as an example of how this could come about is the one that travelers have been living through for the past two decades or so. After all, the airline industry has steadily unbundled the flight product, which was once a package including food, checked bags, and the privilege of actually sitting on the plane next to your travel companion. With today’s more a la carte model, the price of airfare may include nothing more than bare-bones transportation.

What’s more, the airlines that have embraced the a la carte, fee-laden way of doing business most just so happen to be the most hated carriers of all. And across the board in the industry, flight prices have gone up, not down, while the unbundling has been underway.

Is pay TV heading in this same direction? Irwin acknowledges that unbundling undeniably benefits certain kinds of consumers—travelers who don’t fly with bags or care about legroom, and TV viewers who watch only a few channels and no sports. Yet he writes that the effects of unbundling on the average TV customer will be similar to what we’ve seen with the airlines:

For many more people, the result will probably be little or no reduction in total fees, combined with the hassle of making constant decisions about what channels you really want and which you don’t.

The airlines have been working hard over the years to perfect systems for extracting maximum revenues out of passengers. A recent New Yorker story described the broad airline strategy of inflicting “calculated misery” on customers and all but force them to pay fees to avoid the pain: “Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it.”

Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle responded to the idea of “calculated misery” with a slightly different take on the matter. “The problem isn’t greedy airlines” trying to milk customers by making them miserable, she writes. “It’s us.”

When travelers use search engines to find and book the cheapest tickets possible, McArdle explained, we’re sending a message to airlines that low flight prices are the most important and perhaps only criterion in our purchasing decisions. “To win business, airlines have to deliver the absolute lowest fare,” McArdle writes. “And the way to do that is … to cram us into tiny seats and upcharge for everything.”

It’s understandable that people want cheap airfares, just like we want cheap pay TV bills. It’s just that the way providers get to these end points may ultimately make us less—not more—happy. In the end, the standard could become an assortment of confusing fees and bills that, when tallied up, isn’t cheap at all.

FCC stops the clock on some big telecom merger reviews

The companies behind two pending mega mergers with the potential to dramatically alter the U.S. telecom market will have to wait a little while longer to find out if they have the blessing of regulators.

The Federal Communications Commission said in a filing on Wednesday that it is “suspending the pleading cycles” and pausing its self-imposed “180-day informal time clock” deadline for the reviews of Comcast’s proposed $45 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable, and of AT&T’s $48.5 billion deal to buy DirecTV, both announced earlier this year.

The FCC is stopping the clock in order to decide how they will deal with as issue related to “highly confidential” agreements between the respective pay-TV companies and various content providers, including broadcasters such as CBS and Twenty-First Century Fox, which the regulators had hoped to review. However, the FCC says that “certain third-party programmers” object to the idea of anyone at the FCC, along with any lawyers or outside experts, viewing the confidential content agreements. The content providers apparently fear that operational information in the agreements will somehow fall into the hands of their competitors, while regulators at the FCC argue that access to the agreements is crucial to their ability to review the potential mergers.

Now, the FCC says it will take an indefinite pause to consider and rule on the content providers’ objections to regulators and others connected to the FCC gaining access to the documents. The FCC still had roughly 100 days left before hitting its own deadline in both reviews, in which regulators are deciding whether or not the respective deals are in the public’s best interest.

Both potential deals have been met with their share of opposition from people who feel that so much consolidation among telecoms will result in fewer choices for U.S. consumers. The Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger has also been opposed by Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen, who lobbied the FCC to block the deal on the grounds that it would be “anti-competitive.” In August, the FCC also requested further information on Comcast’s broadband business and how the company manages web traffic.

Meanwhile, an AT&T spokesman told Fortune that it is normal for the FCC to pause its review clock and the company still expects its deal to be completed in the first half of 2015. “The FCC’s decision to stop the clock has nothing to do with the merits of our deal or the information we’ve provided them on the significant public interest benefits,” the company said in a statement. “As the FCC’s order makes clear, this relates to content companies’ concerns about the confidentiality of the information they provide the FCC.”

Now worth $2.5 billion, Vice eyes TV network

In a matter of a few days, Vice Media has struck two investment deals worth $500 million, valuing itself at $2.5 billion. Technology Crossover Ventures will invest $250 million for a 10% stake in the company, and A&E, a cable network owned by Hearst and Disney DIS, will do the same.

The deal signals Vice’s move from analog to digital and back again. The company started as a print magazine in 1994, expanded to become a website and YouTube channel, then struck a deal with HBO to produce a weekly documentary show. That’s where Vice quickly learned that television is a lucrative business.

An increasingly large cut of the company’s revenue has come from licensing its content to TV stations around the world. Vice’s licensing revenue is growing so fast that its poised to overtake the rest of Vice’s income sources, a spokesperson told Fortune. In addition to licensing, Vice makes money through its advertising agency, its record label, its film division and its magazine, but the biggest contributor is sponsored content, which includes a multi-year, multi-million deal with Intel to build The Creator’s Project.

Vice’s deal with A&E means Vice content will increasingly appear on cable TV. Despite the talk of cord-cutting, TV still has a large, mass audience, which is different from the one found online. “TV has a huge amount of scale and no matter what anybody thinks, people come home and eat their dinner by 6:30 and they’ve still got six hours of TV to watch,” Vice CEO Shane Smith told Fortune in an interview conducted prior to the deal’s announcement.

Hence Vice’s ambitions to get its content on traditional TV. The first iteration of this deal reportedly involved talks with Time Warner TWX, which would grant Vice its own TV channel. (Vice has called itself the “Time Warner of the street” for years.) But talks fell apart with Time Warner, and the company instead linked up with its current partners.

The deal doesn’t explicitly grant Vice a TV network. It says only that it will allow Vice to “further expand Vice’s distribution capabilities,” and the partnership “guarantees distribution” of Vice’s content “to viewers everywhere and across every screen for years to come,” according to statements from the company.

“We get what we want, which is a bigger audience, more money and better content,” Smith said, speaking about a potential deal in general. “And they get what they want, which is to look smart to shareholders and say, ‘Hey we have an allegiance to somebody who actually knows what they fuck they’re doing with Gen Y.’”

Vice’s ascendance has come from taking advantage of technologies which democratize media production. Vice launched in 1994 as a magazine at a time when desktop publishing software became available to anyone. The company moved into digital video in 2007 when YouTube made it possible for anyone to distribute TV-like content without owning a network. Now, armed with $500 million in cash and cable television allies, Vice moves back into the analog world.

Across its various channels, Vice lays claim to an audience of 150 million. The company is estimated to earn $500 million in annual revenue this year.

Comcast beats profit estimates thanks to boom in Internet users

Comcast CMCSA, the largest cable company in the U.S., reported a second-quarter profit gain Tuesday that surpassed analysts’ expectations as demand for the company’s Internet services boomed.

The cable provider, which is in the midst of acquiring Time Warner Cable TWC, had profits of 76 cents a share, higher than the average analyst estimate of 72 cents a share, according to Bloomberg data.

High-speed Internet customers increased by over 200,000, the best second-quarter net additions in six years, the company announced.

The average monthly bill for video, phone and internet users gained 4.5% to $137.24, helping to boost overall profit gains even while sales came in slightly below analyst expectations. Second-quarter revenue was up 3.5% to $16.8 billion, just shy of the average analyst estimate of $17 billion, based on estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Comcast’s NBCUniversal group sales remained steady year-over-year at about $6 billion, even though NBC had one of its best seasons ever. The network placed first in prime-time ratings and became the most-watched television network among 18-to-49-year-olds.

Comcast’s $42.5 billion bid for Time Warner Cable is still in the works as it awaits regulatory approvals. The Federal Communications Commission is accepting public comments through Aug. 25th before a final decision is made.

Aereo isn’t a cable company, U.S. Copyright Office says

The U.S. copyright office has told Aereo it’s not a cable company, at least not under the terms of copyright law, according to a letter officials sent the company.

Aereo has been seeking designation as a cable company after losing a Supreme Court case last month that deemed its TV-streaming service illegal. The company wants to obtain the same license available to other cable companies to rebroadcast television programs in exchange for set fees.

Copyright officials aren’t buying the change. The “internet retransmissions of broadcast television fall outside the scope of the Section 111 license,” they said in a letter dated July 16 obtained by CNBC.

Section 111 of the Copyright Act gives the office oversight of the licensing fees paid to cable companies for the retransmission of copyrighted works.

Aereo’s filings would not be rejected, yet. The copyright office said it would accept the company’s application provisionally since its case is still before the courts.

Murdoch’s Time Warner bid would be second-largest media deal ever

Twenty-First Century Fox’s FOXA attempt to buy Time Warner TWX, which came to light Wednesday, would be the second-largest media deal ever, trailing behind Time Warner’s ill-fated merger with AOL in 2000.

That status isn’t exactly enviable, given how the $186.2 billion AOL-Time Warner combination blew out in spectacular fashion: After billions in losses, Time Warner eventually spun off AOL AOL in 2009.

But the gap between the two mega-deals could narrow before the deal gets done.

Time Warner’s board shot down the $85-a-share offer, saying that its future standalone value will be “superior to any proposal that Twenty-First Century Fox is in a position to offer.”

Murdoch isn’t so sure about that. He’s willing to take Fox’s offer higher, at least if Time Warner is willing to open its books and engage in talks, Bloomberg News reported.

Fox calculates that the merged company could open the door to more than $1 billion in cost savings. It would include valuable media properties such as TNT, TBS and HBO cable networks. On its own, HBO is valued at $20 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Beefing up its cable network holdings could also give Fox more negotiating power with distributors, helping rack up savings. That could potentially make the $96.7 billion (or higher) price tag–which includes the $80 billion bid value plus about $16.7 billion in Time Warner net debt–worth it to Murdoch.

But, Aereo came back Wednesday with a letter filed to a New York district court saying that it now considers itself a cable provider, pointing to the language used in the Supreme Court ruling.

In its decision, the U.S.’s highest court said Aereo is “substantially similar to” and “is for all practical purposes a traditional cable system.”

As a cable provider, Aereo is then entitled to the standard copyright protections given to all cable companies that pay royalty fees, as long as it can secure a license.

Therefore, the company says, it should not have to stop its live streaming service, which it has only done as a courtesy since no injunction was put in place, according to the court letter.

By identifying as a cable provider — and not a provider of technology equipment as the lower courts had ruled — Aereo is trying to use the Supreme Court decision to its advantage.

CEO Chet Kanojia, who has been rallying popular support through a petition to lawmakers on Protectmyantenna.org, addressed Aereo supporters on the company’s blog Wednesday after submitting the court letter.

“With this most recent decision and in the spirit of remaining in compliance,” Kanojia wrote. “We chose to pause our operations last week as we consulted with the lower court to map out our next steps.”

The plaintiffs, led by ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, believe Aereo’s appeal has no merit because of the company’s past statements that denied it was a cable provider.

Even if the New York court doesn’t go along with the cable-provider definition for Aereo, any injunction could be limited since the Supreme Court said “Aereo only publicly performs when its technology allows near simultaneous transmission.”

That could open the door for Aereo to re-configure its service to allow users to playback television shows after the initial broadcast.

Sprint boss makes case for a T-Mobile deal

Masayoshi Son, chairman of the Japanese firm that controls telecom company Sprint Corp. S, has made the argument that his firm’s potential purchase of rival T-Mobile US Inc. TMUS would actually increase competition rather than lessen it — if, that is, you consider Internet access as the main arena of competition.

Some antitrust regulators have frowned on the idea of the merger because it would mean that there are only three national wireless providers in the U.S., according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

“Right now, there are three big players out there, and they are getting even bigger,” said Son, according to the Journal report. “If anyone says four is better than three, I agree with that. We should be the No. 4.”

The other three competitors are AT&T TGT, which recently purchased DirecTV DTV, the recently-merged Time Warner Cable TWC and Comcast Corp CMCSA, and Verizon VZ.

Sprint has yet to make an official bid for T-Mobile, but it has been clear that both companies would like to make a deal.

BSkyB looking to buy into Italian and German pay-TV markets

FORTUNE — British Sky Broadcasting Group, a cable television company partly-owned by Rupert Murdoch, is looking to buy two other European broadcasters in an effort to extend its pay-TV business across Europe.

BSkyB BSYBY said on Monday that it is in preliminary talks with 21st Century Fox FOX to acquire its pay-TV assets in Germany and Italy. If successful, the deal would create a broadcasting behemoth with about 20 million subscribers, nearly doubling BSkyB’s 10.5 million customers.

BSkyB wants to acquire Fox’s 57% stake in Sky Deutschland, worth about $4.4 billion based on the company’s closing share price last week, as well as the whole of Sky Italia. Murdoch owns stakes in both Sky Deutchland and Sky Italia, and has long wanted to unite them under the BSkyB banner. An acquisition by BSkyB would continue a trend of consolidation in Europe’s media sector.

“Maybe it thinks it has to bulk up in the face of that,” said Oliver Ralph, deputy head of Lex at the Financial Times.

Murdoch’s Fox currently owns a 39% stake in BSkyB. Whether or not Fox would want to acquire more shares of a bulked-up BSkyB is open to question, said Ralph. Murdoch tried to acquire the part of the British broadcaster that he did not already own in 2011 but gave up amid allegations of misconduct at News Corp.’s UK newspapers.

A bigger BSkyB could generate cost savings in product development and have more clout when bidding for sports or movie contracts. But only Germany would promise much growth: The number of Italian pay-TV subscribers has declined over the past three years.